Miracle on 46th Street

Men about town, or new to it, know the Empire State Building is only a second feature. So are Shea Stadium, Madison Square Garden, the Statue of Liberty, the Guggenheim Museum, Radio City Music Hall and Central Park. For in New York City these days, the fastest, flashiest show around is at the corner of Broadway and 46th Street.

It plays to an S.R.O. audience. Admission is free, the performance scheduled for 11:30 p.m. But sports fans must jockey for position, and the crowds gather early every night of the week but Sunday. By 11, they are a good thousand strong, amiable at first, ruly and obedient. Some nibble candy bars left over from the movies, others nip from flasks. Excitement mounts. So do six policemen, onto snorting steeds. Sixteen more police get the barriers set up along 46th Street and part way across the Broadway exit. The throng fidgets: gloves drop, eyeglasses break, drunks mutter, old men complain and ask to be taken home, sophisticates yawn but stay rooted, teen-agers warm up for the squeal. Someone starts the rumors ("She's gone to Beirut, or Beverly Hills, or some place; she's not here; she's never coming; she never has been here, neither has he"). Always there are people, deposited by misfortune on the wrong block, who stumble bewilderedly down theater row, wondering aloud whether Mme. Nhu is back in town or what? But they are adventuresome souls and queue up anyway. The crowd is pushing 3,000, and each other.

Countdown. The door under the dark marquee at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater creaks open. Someone looks out, checks the field, withdraws. And then, blast off. Out of the stage door steps Elizabeth Taylor. She is wearing yellow, or lavender, or green, or rose, or some other color, never anything she has ever worn before or will again. The audience surges forward. She crosses the sidewalk in seven steps or three seconds. Hamlet follows her, not all that melancholy.* She flashes a sudden dazzling, billiondollar smile and slips into the limousine purring in wait at the curb. It pulls out slowly, flanked by mounted policemen on either side, and creeps leisurely down the center of the street. From the back seat she smiles again, lifts a hand and delivers a wave the way Elizabeth II never properly learned.

By 11:40, the cortege reaches Broadway and vanishes into the dark. Shrieks long since shrieked hover in the air like radioactivity, echo along the empty trail. The moment is gone, the brief encounter between man and myth is nothing but memory. Manhattan's greatest spectacle is over. But only for the night. With Hamlet held over until August and nine weeks still to go, his lady is sure to keep the show off the road and onto the street.

* He need not be. When he was out with an abscessed tonsil for teo performances last week, roughly 40% of the ticket holders demonstrated that they had come to hear Richard Burton or nobody, demanded their money back.

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